Contract Negotiations: A Critical Moment -- 2/21/19

Dear Members,

We are at a critical moment in the contract campaign. Both State and City budgets are being decided, and hundreds of PSC members are working to ensure that the final budgets include increased CUNY funding.

The moment is critical also because pressure is building within our own union, and nationally, for justice for teachers and students. The PSC’s ambitious contract agenda is aligned with the movement of K-12 teachers for the resources both teachers and students deserve.

Meanwhile the CUNY trustees have finally named a new chancellor. The day after Félix Matos Rodríguez was appointed, the union made it clear[6] that his success will depend heavily on whether he is able to resolve our contract.

So the stakes are high, and it’s time for an account of where we stand.

First, what we are fighting for:

This contract is about salary gains and salary equity.

Our bargaining agenda[7] focuses on four urgent needs, encompassing every member of the faculty and professional staff:

1. Salary increases across the board, with back-pay
2. Additional equity increases for the lowest-paid full-time positions, including Lecturers and CLTs
3. A breakthrough on adjunct pay to $7,000 minimum per course
4. Non-economic improvements to make CUNY more livable: protections of our rights using educational technology; free CUNY tuition for the children of full-time employees; contract language against bullying; restructured graduate assistantships; paid family leave to add to the existing paid parental leave; and more.

In addition, we want to consolidate and improve on gains made in the last contract, especially the reduction in the teaching load, the HEO assignment differential, and the adjunct three-year appointment.

The PSC has also ensured that an issue at the center of most current American labor battles, increased healthcare costs, will not be part of our negotiations. The union’s Welfare Fund is strong, and the PSC is part of a citywide labor coalition that has maintained the option of premium-free health insurance.

Where we stand in negotiations:
After 15 formal bargaining sessions[8] and many informal meetings, the union has presented each of our demands and reams of data[9] in support. Many PSC members have attended bargaining sessions as observers, and some have added testimony at the bargaining table in support of specific demands. The union bargaining team has heard management on their demands and has begun to respond.

But in order for the two sides to make serious progress, we need an economic offer from management. To date, no offer has been made. The PSC is increasing our pressure for an offer that responds to our demands.

Why the demand for 7K is a demand for every member:
Raising adjunct pay to a minimum of $7,000 per course would have a dramatic effect on adjuncts. But it would also be a win for everyone, including students.

CUNY’s low pay for adjuncts and increasing reliance on adjunct labor hurts everyone economically. We have a shared interest in ending the disgraceful underpayment of adjuncts, whether we are full-time faculty, professional staff members or other CUNY workers. Management’s ability to pay anyone a substandard wage depresses everyone’s pay. All of our work is devalued when anyone can be paid just $3,222 for teaching a college course. And the workload of every full-time faculty or staff member is increased because adjuncts cannot be on campus full time.

Students suffer from adjuncts’ underpayment because adjuncts have to run out after class to other part-time jobs in order to make ends meet. Adjuncts are not paid to invest the time students need, although many of them do.

Equal pay for equal work is always a victory. Ending the scandal of adjunct pay would be a moral victory and a victory for the quality of education. But it would also be a material gain for everyone who works at CUNY. That’s why it’s everyone’s fight.

The next six weeks are critical. The State budget is due to be finalized by April 1, and the City budget is being negotiated. Hundreds of other groups are pressing the Legislature to address their issues; we must speak up with enough force to ensure that funding for CUNY becomes a priority. If you haven’t yet taken the simple step of sending a message to your representative[11], why wait any longer? Please send your message now.

If you haven’t yet signed up to be part of a campus action, contact your chapter chair[12] and let him or her know that you want to be included. Several chapters are holding “grade-ins” to make our labor, particularly adjuncts’ labor, visible. Others are showing up at public events held on campus and letting visitors know what the labor situation is at CUNY. Others are holding meetings, teach-ins and informational pickets.

Meanwhile 600 adjuncts are logging the hours they spend working for every class they teach, thousands of members and students have signed petitions for a fair contract, more than 100 members have traveled to Albany to press their legislators, union leaders have been arrested in civil protest, and the PSC is making our case in the press. Each action we do collectively builds the union’s power for the next one. Mark your calendar for April 11, when the union will hold a mass event.

Who speaks for the PSC:
As members, you have elected union leadership for your campus[12], your chapter and the PSC as a whole. We are leading an intense and important campaign. We welcome efforts by members to seek to influence union policy through the democratic process and to raise hard questions. That’s exactly what should happen in a vibrant union. But we will not ignore attempts by some members to represent themselves as the union leadership and mislead other members.

Some members have attempted to create the impression that the position of the union as a whole is “7K or Strike.” They have printed signs intended to be mistaken for PSC signs and misrepresented the union’s position in social media and reports on chapter resolutions.

The elected leaders of the union recognize the intense commitment of these members to our shared goal, and we welcome their energy for the fight. But “7K or Strike” is not the position of the PSC leadership and not the position voted on by the bargaining team directly involved in negotiations or the delegates elected to represent you.

The question of a strike should never be off the table for a serious union, even for a public-sector union in New York State, where such strikes are illegal. Especially in this legal climate, however, a union should not undertake a strike without profound respect for the membership and a clear strategy on how a strike would succeed.

Why we need to work together:
In the last round of bargaining, after six years of CUNY’s stalling, the PSC held a carefully planned strike authorization vote following democratic votes in our Executive Council and Delegate Assembly. Union members collectively held thousands of one-on-one conversations with other members to explain what a strike would mean, why it could be the right thing to do, and why we needed support. The result was decisive. Members voted by 92%[13] to authorize the union leadership to call a strike if necessary.

If the PSC gets to a point in bargaining in this round where a strike authorization could be necessary, we will have an open discussion and a vote in the Delegate Assembly on whether to take that step. The PSC leadership would never consider a strike without one-to-one conversations with every sector of the membership, without honest discussion with members about what a strike entails, without a plan for how to handle the severe legal and economic penalties a strike would trigger for the union, and without a sober assessment of what the union would stand to gain in a strike versus what we would risk losing.

Withholding labor is a uniquely powerful weapon of labor unions. The political and moral effect of a strike can extend far beyond the workers who participate directly. That is one of the clear lessons of labor history and of the beautiful and brilliant teachers’ strikes in the past two years. New York State’s ban on public-sector strikes is a profound abrogation of our rights, and should be repealed, especially now that the federal law on labor unions has been changed. The PSC delegates recently reaffirmed our position on the Taylor Law and voted to work systematically to end its prohibition on strikes.

Where we go from here:
The fight for this contract and $7K for adjuncts is an epochal fight. If we win--when we win—we will have transformed our entire workplace. To make that happen, we need every member working together. I call on all members to join the actions being organized by the union leadership on your campus and in the University as a whole. On some campuses, this is happening already.

Demanding A Fair Contract, Funding for Quality Education

Elected leaders of the faculty and professional staff union at the City University of New York (CUNY) were arrested Monday, December 10 while demanding a contract that will help ensure a quality education for the half-million CUNY students across the city. Seventeen protesters, including the union president, vice president and secretary, local campus leaders and members of the executive council, blocked the doors to Baruch College near the Flatiron District of Manhattan during a meeting of the CUNY Board of Trustees. Hundreds more CUNY faculty and staff chanted “CUNY Trustees, do you job! Demand the funding CUNY needs!” during the blockade. Read more. [14]

Bargaining Update #5

As pressure builds for an economic offer on our contract, it’s time for some graphic expression of our demands. The eleven new posters in the above slideshow have been issued by the PSC. The posters call for “Contract Now!” and highlight many of the union’s major demands. Send a visual message about the demands that are important to you and show your support for demands that are important to your coworkers. Contact your chapter chair [15]to find out how to get a poster or two, and plaster your hallways!

As of November 30, our contract is a year overdue. The CUNY Board of Trustees is expected to announce the University’s budget request within the next two weeks. The budget request should reveal whether management is asking the City and State for full funding for our contract, plus funding for the full-time faculty teaching load reduction and the substantial additional investment needed to reach a $7,000 minimum for adjunct pay.

The trustees have another public hearing scheduled for Monday, December 3, at LaGuardia Community College, and the hearing may include testimony on the budget. The PSC leadership plans to testify, and other members and students are also planning to speak. All members are encouraged to speak out, but the major PSC event will be Monday, December 10, the day of the expected Board vote on the budget proposal for next year.[16]
Join the bargaining team at the December 10 meeting and help us to pack the room. The trustees need to know that we are watching and that we are prepared to act. If the budget request does not include what PSC members need, members should be ready for a protest action as early as that evening. We need everyone there in support! Click here to let us know we can count on you to attend[16] the Board meeting: Monday, December 10, at 4:30 p.m. at Baruch College’s Vertical Campus.

As the union leadership and activists built pressure on the trustees throughout the fall, the bargaining team continued to meet across the table from CUNY management for detailed negotiations. Formal bargaining sessions have been held about every two weeks, and scores of rank-and-file PSC members have attended as observers. Click here[17] if you’d like to be contacted about upcoming opportunities to observe.

Management Demands
CUNY management continues to focus on a small number of demands. In addition to the demand discussed in the last bargaining update[18] to allow summer teaching to be substituted for teaching in the Fall and Spring semesters as part of the annual full-time faculty teaching load, management representatives introduced two other demands as priorities. One is to create a new provision for non-recurring payments to full-time faculty for specialized work assignments performed in addition to their normal workload, such as development of new online courses. The other is to reconfigure six credits of the current 24 credits of reassigned time for junior faculty, to be used only after receiving tenure.

The PSC bargaining team is considering both proposals carefully and weighing whether to make counterproposals. We are taking into consideration the potential effects of management’s proposals as well as the needs of tenured and untenured faculty, part-time faculty and professional staff. At the same time, the bargaining team continues to call on University management to secure full funding for the teaching load reduction agreed to last year and to preserve the vital current allocations of reassigned time.

PSC Demands for HEOs and Graduate Assistants
The October 26 session focused entirely on improvements for Higher Education Officer (HEO) employees. Previous sessions had featured union demands for higher salaries across the board, equity increases for CLTs and Lecturers, $7K for adjuncts, and other needs. One of the union’s priorities in this round is to improve the new program for a discretionary salary differential of $2,500 for Assistants to HEO, HEO Assistants and HEO Associates who have reached the top step of the salary schedule. The salary differential, along with changes in the reclassification criteria for HEOs, was one of the breakthroughs achieved in the last contract; the bargaining team argued strongly for additional adjustments to ensure that the provision works as it should. Joined by a large group of HEO observers, the bargaining team presented a detailed account of where the provision has worked well and where it has not and argued for the changes needed to ensure fairness and transparency on every campus. We also presented the other union proposals to address the needs of HEOs, who now number more than 5,000 at CUNY.

The November 7 session addressed the PSC’s comprehensive proposal to reconfigure graduate assistantships to align with the new structure of doctoral employee funding implemented by the Grad Center several years ago. A large contingent of graduate employees attended the session as observers. A detailed account of the proposed changes was sent immediately after the session to all graduate employees and central Grad Center faculty; send a message here[19] if you would like to receive it. Graduate employees not only teach a significant number of CUNY classes; they represent the future of the profession. The union bargaining team pressed hard for provisions that would enable them to live in New York and contribute to CUNY while earning their degrees.

Keep the pressure on!
The PSC is a large and diverse union. Years of contract battles have taught us that we achieve the most for each group when we organize together and fight for all. That’s why the bargaining team is asking you to display a poster not just for the contract demands closest to you, but for the demands that matter most to others. And it’s why we need a powerful presence at the Board of Trustees meeting on December 10.[16]
Pressure works. As the CUNY trustees decide what to seek in next year’s budget, this is the moment to keep the pressure on.

Press the Presidents Petitions

PSC chapters are collecting signatures on local petitions urging the presidents of their colleges to publicly support fair adjunct faculty pay of $7000 per course and increased salaries for all CUNY faculty and staff. Just as important, the petitions urge the college presidents to push for a CUNY budget request that includes public funds to support the union’s contract demands. The current collective bargaining agreement is not sufficiently funded by the State. As a result, colleges have been forced to cannibalize academic budgets to help cover the costs. Seven chapters have their petitions posted online. Add your name to the petition for your campus.